Bridges between the living and the dead: Landscapes of Resistance, (re)Memorialization and Alternative Narratives

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For many of us, the final the resting place of our ancestors can anchor us to the landscapes of our families’ histories and to our community. For victims of settler colonialism and creeping genocide, whose homelands were stolen and burial places desecrated or erased, the recovery of their ancestors can offer validation and support their histories that were otherwise obscured and/or erased by settler colonial practices. The Historic Belén Bioarchaeological, project holds the descendant community at its center, bringing forward their dead as testimony to their long regional connection. Descendants place-based knowledge and stories combined with archaeology, bioarchaeology, archival, genealogical, and ethnohistoric records, create new ways to think about how the dead can connect long held memories, and serve to underscore the perseverance of the ancestor-descendants resistance to erasure. We discuss how the dead stand in testimony to make visible the heritage, history, and stories of a community, offering new and alternative narratives within the larger landscapes of New Mexican and North American Southwestern histories. This is a story of how descendants may recover and renegotiate their history learning directly from their ancestors’ bodies, to reclaim their connections to the land.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50658